emotion and attention

Question 1

Easterbook hypothesis

Answer 1

1959 - attentional resources are allocated to the emotional aspects of a situation, leaving little resources to peripheral, non-emotional aspects

emotionally salient stimuli narrows out attention to focus on it
- evolutionary benefit but can be disadvantageous in others eg. eyewitness testimony

weapon focus effect

Question 2

two themes of effect of emotion on attention

Answer 2

1. attention to the emotional quality of the stimulus

2. attention to the emotional state of the individual - e.g. counselling

Question 3

attentional biases of the clinical population

Answer 3

enhanced focus on the emotional material that has emotional congruence with their vulnerability e.g. alcohol for alcoholics.
- empirical evidence that attentional biases represent cognitive vulnerabilities for anxiety and depression –> more focussed on items perceived as threatening/disturbing

Question 4

types of tasks used to study emotion and attention

Answer 4

filtering tasks - present targets and distracters together to test ability to suppress/ignore the latter and indicate ability to manage attention

search tasks - find and report on a particular target in an array of distracters

cuing tasks -stimuli/event attracts attention to a particular location, followed by a target to be detected - attention is measured by the speed or accuracy of response

multiple tasks - allocate their limited processing capacity to meet more than one demand

Question 5

dichotic listening task

Answer 5

2 auditory messages presented simultaneously and ppt is asked to repeat one (shadow) and ignore the other -- attention must be focussed on one channel. 
salient stimuli (name/taboo words etc) captures attention = leads to mistakes and also stimuli related to disorder in clinical populations ==> guide in diagnostics as disruption by salted stimuli can underpin the severity of the disorder

Question 6

emotional stroop task

Answer 6

• asked to name the ink colour of emotionally charged/neutral words –> longer response latency for emotional words - not for positive words only those implying threat

widely used in the study of clinical populations e.g. anxiety - strong interference from threatening words

Question 7

Eilola & Havelka 2011 emotional and taboo stroop

Answer 7

delay for emotional (threatening) and taboo words even when english is their second language

Question 8

visual search task

Answer 8

emotionally salient info is detected faster and is more distracting than neutral

Question 9

Byrne and Eysenck (1995)

trait anxiety and search task

Answer 9

high/low trait anxiety ppts required to detect a single happy or angry face among an array of neutral

low/high anxiety performed equally in finding the happy face

higher anxiety took longer to pick out the happy face = quicker to pick out the angry face –> continually on high alert and looking out for threat

Question 10

cueing - dot probe task

Answer 10

threatening/neutral stimuli presented simultaneously in different spatial locations.
target item presented at one of the cued locations
reaction time is quicker when target appears where the threatening target was due to focus already being on that side

also shown to work for positive stimuli - human faces capture attention when presented to left VF but not for animals = only when there is evolutionary relevance

Question 11

emotional attentional blink

aka emotion-induced attentional blindness

Answer 11

brief appearance of a task-irrelevant, emotionally arousing image captures attention = individual cannot detect target stimuli for several 100ms after the emotional stimuli

can detect altered sensitivity to disorder relevant stimuli in psychiatric conditions

Question 12

exogenous attention

Answer 12

low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimulus
attention is rapidly and involuntarily oriented towards such stimuli even if they are not relevant to the current task
change in environment - sudden change grabs attention
cannot consciously change

Question 13

endogenous attention

Answer 13

driven by goals/strategies of the individual
voluntarily, consciously initiate and less rapid than exogenous
oriented towards stimuli related to the task that the individual is trying to achieve
voluntarily - driven by goals, what you consciously pay attention to

Question 14

emotional/motivated attention

Answer 14

rapid and involuntary but depends on some of the observers internal factors such as affective state
sits between exogenous/endo attention

some are more responsive than others; attention influenced by emotional stimuli

Question 15

attentional biases

Answer 15

driven by 2 mechanisms:

1. initial orienting towards the stimulus
2. difficulty in disengaging attention from the stimulus and relocating it towards another

emotion affects both
more arousing stimuli =stronger attentional bias and more relevant = greater bias

Question 16

pool et al (2016) attentional bias for positive stimuli meta-analysis

Answer 16

positive stimuli captures attention but it is easier to disengage
more likely to show attentional bias in visual representation, less likely with just a word –> not the same for negative/threatening stimuli

attentional bias is larger when measured on the initial orienting component rather than on the difficulty in disengagement

bias has similar sizes in stimuli that are not intrinsically emotional and stimuli that are not perceptually salient, but that have acquired a positive value through learning

Question 17

attentional bias for positive emotional stimuli

Answer 17

sig. larger for babies, erotic adults, money, food and self-related (evolutionary gain/learned aspects for gain) stimuli compared to smiling faces/general positive stimuli

Question 18

attentional bias and affective disorders

Answer 18

bias to threat in anxiety disorders
dysphoric stimuli and possible neglect of positive in depression
attenuating bias towards threatening stimuli = lasting symptom relief in anxious individuals (Hallion & Ruscio, 2011). training attention away from dysphoric stimuli may alleviate depression (Wells & Beevers, 2010)

Question 19

wells & Beevers, 2010

dot-probe task to modify selective attention for dysphoric stimuli

Answer 19

dot-probe task to modify selective attention for dysphoric stimuli

trained people for 2 weeks to look away from unpleasant stimuli
little difference at the start but bias worsened at retest for control (not stat. sig.)

those who received training managed to reduce bias to negative stimuli in real life